Norms have permanently changed how businesses are conducted in many markets, industries, and regions. The opportunity is ripe for businesses to participate in digitally-centric markets across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) and build their digital strategy. The IDC APJ Automation Survey 2022, commissioned by UiPath revealed that 88% of Indian organizations agree that automation will be a critical requirement for business excellence, customer experience, and competitive success in the next three years. As more organizations are gearing up to meet digitally savvy customers, the race is on for Indian enterprises to leverage automation to their advantage.
Current productivity, quality, and compliance have led manufacturers in the region to accelerate their digital maturity. Automation empowers manufacturers to streamline operations, improve efficiency, respond to disruptions, and incorporate sustainable operations. The appetite for automation is clear: with many manufacturers making steady investments and efforts to accelerate their automation journey. IDC expects that in the next three years, nearly 3X of Indian organizations will move to an enterprise-wide deployment of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
The importance of leveraging automation in a post-pandemic world
To meet productivity, quality, and compliance demands, APJ manufacturers have been driven to accelerate digital adoption. A larger number of manufacturing firms in the region are looking to leverage automation in operations, especially to support remote capabilities, attain quality data for control and compliance monitoring, assess equipment/asset monitoring to reduce downtime and increase utilization and efficiency. For instance, 74% of Indian organizations are poised to focus more on intelligent automation. Similarly, 92% of Indian organizations will use IPA in more than 20% of their total automation deployments in the next three years to address the needs of high business performance, new customer expectations, and talent shortages.
Furthermore, labour constraints, rapidly increasing labour rates, and the residual impacts of the pandemic will compel many organizations to invest more in automation systems that can be deployed in warehouses and distribution centres to supplement the human workforce. Approximately 60% of supply chain organizations in APJ will prioritize automation investments, thus improving productivity by 20%.
On the other hand, 82% of manufacturing firms in APJ believe that automation is key to increasing productivity, efficiency, and collaboration. This is exemplified by JSW Group, the largest steel maker in India with a strong foothold in the cement, infrastructure, energy, and paint segment. As part of JSW Group’s digital transformation strategy, they adopted their five key business processes’ automation for highly complex and repetitive digital tasks. They automated their vendor invoice processing, logistic invoices, payrolls, payments, and the vendor support cell to eliminate complexity and minimize manual mundane tasks for its employees and stakeholders. Setting up a cross-functional automation process in collaboration with its employees from the various business units and other stakeholders enabled JSW Group to achieve a 300% reduction in processing time and realize four times more productivity. This form of RPA democratization can motivate employees to create value for the company, simplify repetitive tasks, and allow new skill sets to be applied to improve business operations in other areas.
In addition, the IDC report highlighted that organizations will increasingly look to automate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) functions over the next few years, as more than 30% of organizations in APJ are expected to prioritize automation. About 16% of Indian organizations will automate ESG and sustainability use cases next few years. Â Key focus areas for sustainability initiatives over the next two years include optimization of the energy efficiency of products and operations, incorporating circular economy principles (repair/remanufacture/recycle) in operations, the reduction in waste and driving cost efficiencies, and the incorporation of responsible sourcing principles into the supply chain. It is estimated that 40% of major APEJ (Asia Pacific excluding Japan) firms will have completely embedded sustainability into their operations by 2024.
Capture benefits at scale for manufacturing in India with automation
Although the manufacturing sector has so far been a relatively low adopter of automation in the APJ region, a greater number of firms are making steady investments and efforts to accelerate their automation efforts within the next three years. There is a need for disruptive technology, such as RPA in manufacturing, that can help Indian businesses to focus on product innovation and core strengths instead of repetitive tasks that are critical but mundane. Technologies such as AI can also be combined with RPA to enable the automation of tasks that are much more complicated to be addressed with RPA alone, such as predictive maintenance, price forecasting, and quality control. Building these capabilities will help companies in this sector capture benefits at scale, improve customer and employee experience, and build a long-term competitive advantage. The Government of India’s push to strengthen the country’s manufacturing sector will be crucial if India aims to become a $5 trillion economy by 2025 & $10 trillion by 2033-34. While companies from the international smartphone and semiconductor markets are already looking at India as the next global manufacturing hub, the systematic deployment of automation in India’s manufacturing sector could further bolster the growth of this promising sector.